14 May 2025

A Kindle question

 


Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I find myself wondering how Amazon works out what items to recommend to me on Kindle. Specifically, I have questions about their recommendations allegedly based on my recent purchases. A couple of examples from today’s recommendations:

  • A chess book. I have never bought a chess book (or anything chess related) from Amazon. The odd thing is that a couple of weeks ago, I did an Internet search for reviews of chess apps. As a result of that research, I decided to install Lichess on my tablet.
  • A book on ChatGPT and another on AI more generally. Again, I have not bought anything AI related from Amazon. However, some of the blogs I subscribe to do discuss AI from time to time, e.g. its dangers; the immorality of training AI on copyright material; the academic use of AI (specifically, Claude) as a research assistant.

Coincidence? Or does Amazon install tracking cookies to pick up leads for potential sales?

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